While I think the author draws to strong of a line between Open Source
and Closed Source, there is a good book about evaluating Open source
software by Bernard Golden called "Succeeding with open source" [1].
Edward
[1] http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/55124574
Brett Bonfield wrote:
I really like this topic, and I like how you're thinking about it. I
tried to ask similar questions in an article I published in July:
http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/w-e-b-s-i-t-e-find-out-what-it-means-to-me/
I think Jonathan and Nicole nailed it with community health, though
this leads to an additional consideration that I think is more nuanced
than the application/system vs library/module distinction. Scriblio
and SOPAC are built on top of very healthy (from a developer community
perspective) software that has been created with moderately technical
end-users in mind.
This also gets back to Jonathan's very good generalization of your
point about LAMP: "What are its requirements and level of difficulty
for deployment?" When the first few steps are as comparatively easy
for non-developers as a "Five Minute WordPress Install," I think that
has to count for something.
Brett Bonfield
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Nicole Engard <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm with Jonathan on the community health, one of the things I stress
when teaching my open source classes is that the developer and user
community is essential to the success and life of the product.
Nicole C. Engard
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[email protected]> wrote:
Quality of code in general: How well-designed is the code architecture,
for maintenance and debugging? [This not only matters if you plan to do
in-house development with it, but matters for predicting how likely the
product is to stay 'alive' and continue to evolve with the times, instead of
you just being stuck with exactly the version you first installed forever.]
Developer Community: Is there a developer community around this software,
with multiple people from multiple institutions contributing? Or is it just
one founder maintaining it? [One founder maintaining it _can_ work fine, as
long as that founder keeps maintaining it. MarcEdit is a great example. But
the more of a community there is, again, the higher the reliability that the
software will continue to evolve in the future, even if the founder bows out
for some reason. ]
A related topic: Do individual institutions do extensive local
customization to core code, which does not end up merged back into the
'main' distribution? Again, this effects long-term sustainability of the
software.
I wrote a bit on judging one aspect of open source in a Library Journal
article here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6611591.html
I also compiled some opinions from me, Bill Dueber, and others, in what
'good code' looks like in open source here:
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Category:Patterns
I could also pick nits with some of your criteria, but, hey, if they're
important to someone they're important to someone. Some of htem are less
important to me (For instance: "Is it deployed on LAMP" I'd generalize to
"what are it's requirements and level of difficulty for deployment?" We are
quite capable of deploying non-PHP solutions, but that doesn't mean that all
non-PHP solutions are equal for ease of deployment either!. )
Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
What qualities and characteristics make for a "good" piece of open source
software? And once that question is answered, then what pieces of
library-related open source software can be considered "best"?
I do not believe there is any single, most important characteristic of
open source software that qualifies it to be denoted as "best". Instead, a
number of characteristics need to be considered. For example, a program
might do one thing and do it well, but if it is bear to install then that
counts against it. Similarly, some software might work wonders but it is
built on a proprietary infrastructure such as a closed source compiler. Can
that software really be considered "open"?
For my own education and cogitation, I have begun to list questions to
help me address what I think is the "best" library-related open source
software. [1] Your comments would be greatly appreciated. I have listed the
questions here in (more or less) personal priority order:
* Does the software work as advertised?
* To what degree is the software supported?
* Is the documentation thorough?
* What are the licence terms? * To what degree is the software easy to
install?
* To what degree is the software implemented
using the "standard" LAMP stack?
* Is the distribution in question an
application/system or a library/module?
* To what degree does the software satisfy some
sort of real library need?
What sorts of things have I left out? Is there anything here that can be
measurable or is everything left to subjective judgement? Just as
importantly, can we as a community answer these questions in light of
distributions to come up with the "best" of class?
'More questions than answers.
[1] There are elaborations on the questions in a blog posting. See:
http://tinyurl.com/ybk2bef
